Seventy stories and still counting. This is the main result of an ongoing struggle waged since 2017 for the disclosure of all pension and retirement payments by the Brazilian government. On the front line is GIJN member Fiquem Sabendo, a journalism agency specializing in that country’s Freedom of Information Act.
Could news media use drones to better inform the public? To procure new data or do remote fact-checking with small unmanned aircraft? Could drones protect journalists, who have been targets for violence? Enthusiasm waxed. And — a decade later — waned.
Two decades after US-led troops invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime, the organization has retaken control of the country. Our NodeXL mapping from August 9 to 15, found an animated map by the Financial Times showing how the Taliban captured various districts across the country before surging into the capital Kabul earlier this week. In this edition, we also feature an investigation into America’s diabetes crisis by Reuters, a look into Lionel Messi’s legacy at Barcelona by The Economist, and a piece on the history of data journalism by the Guardian.
There are scores of muckraking techniques that can help journalists gain access to elusive sources and data. Here we share the dozen online tools that leading reporters commonly praised in interviews with GIJN in the past year — and especially those that require few or no special digital skills.
As calls for change grow louder in light of the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report and in the run up to COP26 conference in Glasgow this November, it’s time to focus on how data visualization can help people grasp the challenges that lie ahead.
In an environment of increasing restrictions on civic organizations and impunity for crimes against press professionals, independent media in Guatemala are battling threats on several fronts. Here, journalists from three Guatemalan digital media outlets detail the strategies and tools they are using both to survive and to produce quality investigative stories.
The digital security risk to investigative journalism was reaffirmed this month with the release of the Pegasus Project. This involved collaborative reporting by 17 global media outlets on a list of thousands of leaked phone numbers allegedly selected for possible surveillance by government clients of Israeli firm NSO Group. At least 180 journalists are implicated as targets. It also sheds light on four chilling cases profile here.
In interviews over the past year, dozens of leading journalists have told me about the scores of tools and techniques that proved helpful in their investigations. But, again and again, these top muckrakers point to about a dozen tactics that they rely on all the time. We share those favorite techniques in this roundup.
Registration is now open for the 2021 Global Investigative Journalism Conference, which will feature an extraordinary lineup of the world’s most enterprising journalists with an international schedule that shifts across the globe. The conference will take place online in November.
In the first article in a short series, the Media Development Investment Fund looked at the first two of the four major elements of media capture: capture of the media regulator, and control of the public service broadcaster. In this article, it looks at the use of state financing as a control tool, and taking ownership to interfere in editorial.
In March 2020, environmental journalist Helena Carpio, leaned out of her window to see Caracas filled with smoke. Something was burning, but no one knew where and there was no official news on what was happening. She started to investigate, and the resulting project analyzed two decades of satellite data on hotspots to explore the when, where, and why of forest fires in Venezuela and across Latin America.
Our weekly project that maps the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter found several environmental projects this week, including a climate disaster in Germany, air pollution in South Asia, and deforestation in Brazil. We also feature more data-driven coverage of the Tokyo Olympics, an investigation into Bulgarian coal plants, and a guide to creating appealing data visualizations based on simple charts.
Alejandra Xanic, general editor of Quinto Elemento Lab and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, tells how they created the nonprofit journalistic laboratory that is changing the way investigative journalism is produced in Mexico.
In a scandal known as ‘Vacunagate,’ 487 influential people in Peru, including its president, were secretly inoculated against COVID-19 months before vaccines were approved for the public. Two investigative newsrooms in Peru found that Chinese drug makers had secretly sent thousands of ‘courtesy’ vaccine doses to several countries in South America in addition to the doses needed for clinical trials there. Editors from both told GIJN how reporters can tackle this new form of corruption.
A haven of banking secrecy for decades, Switzerland has now become a land of raw materials trading. Most of the private hydrocarbon trading giants have set up their headquarters in Geneva. But unlike banks, which have to comply with international standards on money laundering and tax fraud these trading companies are accountable to virtually no one.
Here’s a preview of what GIJN and partners have in store: Online search strategies, cross-border collaboration, satellite imagery, climate change, crime and corruption, health and medicine, Indigenous issues, women and muckraking, elections, dealing with burnout, flight tracking, podcasts, documentaries, the latest security tips, plus data, data, and more data.
Our NodeXL mapping from July 19 to 25, which tracks the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter each week, found imaginative data-driven coverage of the Olympics by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other major outlets. In this edition, we also feature a piece by Reuters Graphics on how a Chinese lake has been decimated by sand mining, a cross-border investigation into the billion Euro business of elder care, and a deep dive into TikTok’s secretive algorithm by The Wall Street Journal.
Newsletters are popular because their offering is different from the information that is dangerously filtered and molded by social media giant’s random, opaque algorithms. GIJN has selected five original newsletters that can inspire journalists around the world.
Many reporters never notice the “inspect element” option below the “copy” and save-as” functions in the right-click menu on any webpage related to their investigation. But it turns out that this little-used web inspector tool can dig up a wealth of hidden information from a site’s source code, reveal the raw data behind graphics, and download images and videos that supposedly cannot be saved.
Talya Cooper spent several years working alongside journalists in a newsroom, where she witnessed some “unholy messes” of files on both physical and virtual desktops. But as she writes here, while taking good care of data requires some time and money the loss of irreplaceable reporting work can come at a higher cost.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network is delighted to announce the selection of three Asian media organizations as participants in our new Investigative Journalism Assessment Program (IJ-MAP): The Caravan magazine in India, the KBR radio network in Indonesia; and the nonprofit Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.
How do you increase your readers’ interest in climate stories? Two award-winning projects from the online team at Norway’s NRK offer insight that could help newsrooms increase impact and engagement in climate coverage.
Our NodeXL mapping from July 12 to 18, which tracks the most popular data journalism stories on Twitter each week, found a series of articles resulting from the collaborative project that analyzed an unprecedented leak of more than 50,000 phone numbers selected for surveillance. In this edition, we also feature an insight into Facebook’s data wars by The New York Times, an interactive piece by Al Jazeera on how the holy city of Mecca has expanded, and a colorful project by the Washington Post on the rise of K-pop.
The roots of today’s increasingly captured media in India lie deep and go back a couple of decades to the seemingly innocuous newspaper business practices of India’s largest media company, Bennett Coleman & Company, founded in 1838. The resulting, industry-wide cap on newspaper subscription prices in India has, over time, created a very unhealthy, near 100-percent dependence on advertising.
After more than a year of living with a pandemic that shut down the world, lockdowns are beginning to lift for many across the globe. But for many journalists – a number of whom are already struggling with traumas of their own in a beleaguered industry known for its hostile and pressure-cooker environments – concerns are mounting about an impending mental health crisis brought on by a year of mass isolation, uncertainty, and endless dread.
The US Justice Department indicted five Iranian intelligence officials last week, alleging they were part of a plot to surveil and eventually abduct an Iranian-American investigative journalist living in the US. Read the indictment.
Fundamentally, journalists and scholars do similar work – diving into documents, crunching numbers, conducting interviews. But their timeframes, and their measures of success, can be quite different. The Global Reporting Centre tries to bridge that gap, both by funding such collaborations and serving as an ambassador between two very different cultures.
